Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City. Alexandra Richie

will be given German names, their ancestry will be created by a special office.’¹⁴ Twenty thousand children were taken in this way; one witness remembered ‘the agony of the mothers and fathers, the beating by the Germans, and the crying of the children’ as they were taken from their homes.¹⁵

      Nowhere in all Nazi-occupied Europe was the ‘extensive machinery of repression’ as great as it was in Poland.¹⁶ There were always at least 50,000 SS and police on hand to control the despised inhabitants, and as a result nowhere was safe. Local officials in tiny villages and towns could be targeted, or held hostage to be killed later, if a German was attacked. Life in Warsaw became particularly dangerous after September 1943, when Governor Hans Frank decided to hold random round-ups and public executions on the streets. His sole aim was to increase the terror in the hope of intimidating the ‘bandits’ of the Home Army.

      When one walks the streets of Warsaw today, particularly the lovely area around Nowy Świat, with its charming buildings and luxury shops, one comes across grey concrete plaques every few hundred metres or so. Each commemorates thirty or forty people killed by the Germans. In photographs of these random round-ups one can see groups of well-dressed men and women, on their way home from work or off to see friends, cordoned off from the rest of the crowd. They would be put up against a nearby wall, and shot. At first the victims were simply executed, but as the Poles had the annoying habit of yelling patriotic phrases as they died, the Germans took to sealing their mouths with plaster of Paris, or pushing narcotic-soaked rags down their throats to keep them quiet.¹⁷ As the war dragged on and clothing became more scarce, the condemned were forced to strip before they were killed; their bodies were then burned in the ghetto ruins. After evening curfew the names of those who had died were read out over the tinny loudspeakers that hung from posts throughout the city; people listened from their homes, dreading to hear the name of a friend or a loved one.

      The Italian journalist Alceo Valcini, who lived in Warsaw for most of the war, remembered round-ups as late as July 1944. ‘I met an old lady on a street who said, “Go away quickly! Round-ups!” With a beating heart and with my Polish friends I found shelter in the nearest gate. We walked upstairs and strangers opened doors, offering us hospitality for a few hours. Another time after one hour of waiting the concierge came and said that the Germans had gone. I was very touched by the solidarity.’¹⁸ In total the Germans rounded up and killed 40,000 ethnic Poles in Warsaw in this way between June 1941 and September 1944. Erich von dem Bach admitted at Nuremberg that any officer with the rank of captain or higher had the authority to kill fifty to a hundred Poles for every German killed without referring the matter to a higher authority.¹⁹

      The ethnic Poles and the Jews of Warsaw were targeted by the Germans in different ways and at different times, but it gives the Nazis a kind of victory to describe the deaths of the two groups as if they were entirely removed from one another. The murder of the Jews was unique in its extent and barbarism, but the whole of Warsaw was terrorized and destroyed, and its people murdered, throughout the war, albeit to different degrees. Five hundred years of Jewish culture were simply erased from the city centre in an enormous ‘Grossaktion’ that is hard to fathom in its sheer scale. The total death toll in Warsaw, including Jews and non-Jewish Poles, amounted to 685,000 human beings. In 1939 Warsaw had had the second-largest Jewish population in the world after New York. Only 11,500 of them survived the war. What was done in the Polish capital was, as the historian Gunnar Paulsson has put it, ‘the greatest slaughter of a single city in history’. For Warsaw, the deaths of so many of its citizens was a tragedy from which it will never truly recover; the end of so much life and the elimination of an entire culture completely and forever changed the character of the metropolis on the Vistula.²⁰

      It was precisely this rule of terror that instilled such deep longing for freedom in Warsaw, which is why, in the summer of 1944, the atmosphere in the city changed so radically. The citizens could hear the echo of Soviet guns in the distant suburbs of Wawer, Otwock and Zielonka. They knew that a German officer had very nearly succeeded in killing Hitler on 20 July; they knew about the Normandy landings, and were excitedly following the progress of the Allied troops in France via illegal radio broadcasts and underground newspapers. And above all, everywhere they could see the physical evidence of a defeated German army for themselves.

       The German Retreat

      The amazing success of Bagration had an enormous impact on Warsaw, not least because it turned the city into a mêlée of retreating German soldiers racing westward in their attempt to escape the hammer blows of the Red Army. Alceo Valcini watched from his tiny room in the Venice Hotel as groups of fleeing Germans made their way across Poniatowski Bridge and Jerusalem Avenue, and down Senatorska and Chłodna Streets. ‘They weren’t soldiers any more. They were remains of human beings, tired, frightened, passive, in a state of visible physical and moral depression. They were sweating, starving, covered in mud from head to foot, sitting on equipment pulled by horses or battered cars or peasant wagons with cows and dogs alongside. They had long beards and gazed with dimmed eyes … a shapeless mass of beaten soldiers.’

      These were the stragglers who had escaped the encirclements and massacres in Byelorussia, and were desperately trying to get across the Vistula before the Soviets attacked again. These Rückkämpfer, the survivors of Minsk and Grodno and Vitebsk, limped through Warsaw in their ragged grey-green uniforms and cracked boots, their faces unshaven and their steps faltering. Gas masks and mess tins swung from leather belts, dented camouflage helmets shielded gaunt faces. A lucky few still had grenades in their belts, or submachine guns or anti-tank rockets over their shoulders, but some were barefoot, with no equipment at all, and a great many were covered in bloody bandages. It was like a medieval horde.

      Confusion and collapse of discipline and order became the rule. ‘We didn’t attend to our dead. We didn’t bury them either,’ one soldier recalled of the flight. Sometimes the soldiers encountered officers fresh from Germany who clearly had no idea of the magnitude of the defeat. One infantryman who had walked for three days without rest was hauled up at a crossroads by a prim Oberst who yelled at him for his ‘disgraceful’ appearance. When the soldier tried to explain what had happened to his regiment, the officer made him use a piece of grass to point at the map so he did not touch it with his filthy hands. ‘I found myself resisting the urge to toss the table and the map at him.’ Gallows humour abounded among the completely demoralized soldiers: ‘We are, with every step, capturing ground to the west,’ they joked. They made fun of Hitler, too, referring to him as ‘Grofaz’, an abbreviation of the title ‘Grösster Feldherr Aller Zeiten’ – the greatest commander in history – that Keitel had invented for the Führer in all seriousness after the collapse of France.²¹ Even those at the top began to doubt whether the Führer really could win the war – Rochus Misch, Hitler’s bodyguard, said that he ‘no longer believed in a final victory’.²²

      Misch did not, of course, voice his doubts, but by now the men of Army Group Centre were daring to say the unthinkable out loud. Drunken German soldiers could be seen staggering arm in arm down Marszałkowska Street in the heart of Warsaw: ‘They paid no attention to discipline and were shouting at the tops of their voices: “I am sick of this war!” Officers who saw them turned pale, but looked away.’²³

      For their part, Warsawians were both shocked and elated by the sight of the bedraggled army. Could this really be the mighty Wehrmacht that had defeated them so easily in 1939? Poles quietly lined up along Jerusalem Avenue and Wolska Street to watch them file past. A few girls waved handkerchiefs and called out in mock sadness, ‘Goodbye, goodbye, we will never see you again!’ The gesture would have been unthinkable a month before. Given the sheer numbers plodding through the city, the retreat of the German soldiers was quite calm. The exodus of German civilians, however, was another matter.

      There is little that compares with the corruption and the utterly venal attitude of the German colonizers in the east, and Warsaw was no exception. These men and women, often of low standing at home, took postings to far-off capitals where suddenly they found they could ‘be somebody’. They were detested by those forced into subservience; this was particularly true of Warsaw, which before